I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes

by Jeff Baker

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The draws for the October 2024 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were A Monster Story set in a Cake Shop involving a Rubber Duck. Here’s the story, but can you spot the real monster? —-jeff

The last time I’d been in the shop it had been different.

Even the sign over the door reading Shrewsbury’s Cake Shop had been one of those bright neon things that looked so retro. Now, there was an old wooden sign hanging from a pole over the door. Glossy, painted and worn. Nonetheless, I went in.

Even though it was midnight and the store was closed and dark the door was unlocked.

The Girl was standing there, tall and slender and ageless in front of the glass counter laden with cakes. I knew something had lured me in here. She’s the lure, I thought. She eyed me hungrily in the dim light from the outside street lamp.

“Good dawning to thee, friend,” she said. She knew my vulnerability to the Bard.

“The bird of dawning singeth all night long,” I replied.

“Very nice, Conried,” she said, her tongue slithering against her mouth. “Your team won the previous battle, hence this store is as it is not as it was.”

“Yes,” I said, wishing I had not changed with it. My immaculate jacket and suit had become a ragged coat. My stubbly beard smelled of spilled whiskey. I’d had a house. Now I didn’t even have a car. “But the winning will not be changed,” I said.

“All things change,” the Girl said. “In fact they change always.” She raised a hand and pulled something from the darkness. The yellowish item in her hand squeaked and looked almost funny, as if the rubber duck longed for its bathtub. But I knew better. There was an air of cold menace about it.

She tossed it in the air as she hissed “Dolggna! Nyarlothotep! Danikoth! In the name of the Snakes I your Lady summon your darkness!”

Someone else would have expected the rubber duck to sprout wings, instead it fell to the floor as I knew it would. Sitting in the long rectangle of blue light from the front window, it’s shadow began to spread like spilled ink on water, cloudy tendrils with sharp points. The light began to flicker and I caught a glimpse of the cakes in the glass cases shivering expectantly.

I raised my arms and intoned “By the No-When! In the name of the Swordsmen! By the soaring Dragonet, I who walk the Living City summon thee in the name of the Spiders!”

There was a rush of wind from around and under the coat I was wearing. Shadows of a different sort swirled out from my own shadow and around the shadows produced by the duck thing. The pointed shadows around it rippled and became a huge shadowy claw accompanied by a piercing call that sounded like a prolonged squeak that was from the toy that was no longer a toy. In turn, my shadowy defenders dived and battered the claw thing letting out a hissing like a thousand angry cats ready for bloody battle.

Beyond them the Girl swelled, mouth open in a huge black “0,”becoming somehow taller than the small room could hold but still standing there in the shop and not touching the low ceiling.

The conflicting shadows swirled around each other, becoming at once a Mobius strip and a closing bloom of a dark flower. And from that bloom was a burst of negative light and an echo of an indescribable sound. The light engulfed the Girl (who had never been a girl) and shadows and girl vanished leaving not even a trace of the other creature which had certainly not really been a rubber duck.

The cake shop was silent. Nothing seemed to have changed. But the light had changed, I realized. The blue light of the lamp from outside was now a mellow yellow. I glanced down at myself. I was attired in a professorial set of tweeds. I smiled.

I stepped outside. The sign on the shop was now painted on the wood above the door. It read in simple flowing cursive: “Konditorei.”

“German for Cake Shop,” I mused aloud. I looked up.

There, in the cloudy sky a Zeppelin slowly edged through the night, carrying passengers towards the station on Telegraph Hill.

I smiled again and wandered toward my car, wondering what brand it was this time.

—end—

AUTHOR’S NOTE: An homage to one of my very favorite authors who also liked Shakespeare and cats and Lovecraft. Don’t know how he felt about rubber ducks! —-jeff